Letter to the Palm Beach Post

Our Lady of the Rosary Old Roman Catholic Church
144 North Federal Highway (US#1, North of Hillsboro Blvd.), Deerfield Beach FL 33431
www.bellsouth.net/p/pwp-OLRosary

Rev. Fr. Charles T. Brusca, Pastor
Please direct correspondence to:
679 SW 17^th Court, Boca Raton, FL 33486
561-391-8385 webmonk@bellsouth.net

While Thomas Monaghan’s letter, published on Aprtil 15^th rightly points out that he is not a traditional Catholic, it presents some grave misrepresentations about those of us who are.

Traditional Catholics are not part of a “breakaway” or “schismatic” movement. Our reason for existence is to preserve the moral and dogmatic teachings of Jesus Christ as they were handed down through the Apostles and the holy Popes of the Catholic Church. The New Order Church, on the other hand, has broken away from this unique succession of Catholic Truth. It is a matter of public record that many of the New Order hierarchs today, are rewarded for preaching and doing things for which their predecessors of past centuries would have punished them with lifelong imprisonment or even death.

For good reason or bad, the Second Vatican Council was called under the legitimate authority of Pope John XXIII, making it a “valid” council. Yet, among all of the ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, it had the unique distinction of having insisted—both in its opening and closing statements—that its own decrees could be ignored by the faithful with impunity! If anything, this demonstrates that the Holy Ghost was at work at Vatican II, for a number of those decrees contained notions clearly at variance with the unchangeable teachings of the Catholic Church—leaving the faithful under obligation to ignore them (religious indifferentism, for example, or the redefined ends of holy matrimony).

Pope John Paul II is the Pope—it matters not that we have had many who were far more zealous in their defense of the Catholic Faith—in truth we have had a few that were arguably worse. There are a few—presumably the reference was to Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father—who have adopted the idea of “Sedevacantism,” that the Seat of Peter is vacant because of the errors of the man who appears to be sitting in it. They are not radically different from those New Order Catholics who misinterpret the doctrine of papal infallibility to mean that the Pope can do no wrong. Whereas such New Order Catholics would go on to conclude that “since the Pope can do no wrong, all of the changes he has made to the Church must be good,” Sedevacantists tend to argue that “since the Pope can do no wrong, and we have seen him do many things wrong, he must not be the Pope.” But even the most radical Sedevacantist is in no way antipapal—he just yearns for the day when an orthodox Catholic will again rule as Pope.

Vatican II did not prescribe the Novus Ordo, let alone its abominable mistranslations and bizarre variations. Indeed, anyone reading the liturgical decree of Vatican II would be forced to conclude that it described the liturgy of traditional Catholics far better than it described the Novus Ordo.